Summer Most Heat Moon
After dropping Mary off at the airport, I drove into Minneapolis, taking Lake Street from Hiawatha all the way to the Fuji Ya, then after the Fuji-ya Bento special, on three more blocks to the Highpoint Print Co-operative. Lake Street is alive, predominantly Latino from Hiawatha to the 35W overpass, then changing briefly to urban poverty and quickly picking up scale as it heads toward Uptown.
There was much al fresco dining, including a place I’d not seen before “Louie’s Wine Dive.” A slogan on the window said, “Where foodies meet winos.” That got a laugh. From me. Fuji Ya had outside dining but I sat inside, watching the people come and go, young mostly, hip with flowing skirts, sleeves of tattoos, body piercings, hip young haircuts, one guy with an inexplicable mustache that featured a left side Fu Manchu and a right side more mundane trim close to the face. He looked imbalanced, but maybe that was the point.
The energy all along Lake, but especially in the area around the Bryant Lake Bowl, Louie’s and the Highpoint was buzzing. Sex was in the air with short skirts, young men and women dressed in their best Friday night out and cool casual attire, looking at each other with the uh-oh what am I doing with him, her look so familiar from another life era.
Shiva, Aprhodite, Isis all out for a stroll, winking and nodding at the sound, the colors, the heat generated by persons trying to get to know each other, to bridge the chasm between one universe and another. The multiverse on the hoof.
In this period of my life I was of the city, not living in the city, rather part of it, a blood cell swimming in the arteries and veins of urban politics. Different faces, a different time, but the same groping, flailing, hoping.
Tonight was the first time Minneapolis felt really big city to me. A young man, skateboard under his arm, pressed his entry code. This was a metal and brick apartment building right on Lake Street, a block from the Bryant Lake Bowl, on the same block as Louie’s. His life was of Lake Street. It was his milieu.
I was a bit intoxicated by the energy, surfing it, the years shedding off my shoulders until I was 28, 30 and standing there, ready to dive in.
At the Highpoint opening I went first as this younger me, having bathed in the waters of eternal youth along Lake Street. I wanted to fall in love, to find a print I couldn’t imagine life without-a striking image that would hang on a Colorado wall and call back Minneapolis, this adult home of mine. I wanted to fall in love, but I couldn’t find a partner. The prints were interesting, some of them, but nothing reached out and made an effort to cross the divide into my space.
(Lucas The Elder Cranach: The Fountain of Youth)
When I realized I wasn’t finding that image, the years came back on me and I was tired, a week of work outside and inside, playing host and chauffeur, dog rangler. No, I was not young, nor did I want to be. What I wanted was to go home.
Driving out, away from Lake Street and Uptown, away from the Dionysian street, I made my way toward the exurbs, the place where Dionysus gives way to Apollo, to Minerva, an ordered, thoughtful, peaceful place. My study is the antithesis of Louie’s Wine Dive, neither foodie nor wino here.
But I like the opportunity to visit that time of heat, of searching and yearning. Some of its fire remains on board, even as I write this. It’s that dialectic between fertile youth and stable old that makes culture exciting.
